You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. --FRANZ KAFKA

Friday, December 08, 2006

from Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Lecture

Many of you know how much I admire the work of Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, particularly the multi-layered Snow. His Nobel lecture, with the enticingly mysterious title "My Fahter's Suitcase didn't disappoint. All of it is wonderful, but this, in particular, left me as struck and bedazzled as certain passages in his novels:

"The writer's secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind. In the old stories, I love the patience of Ferhat, who digs through mountains for his love – and I understand it, too. In my novel, My Name is Red, when I wrote about the old Persian miniaturists who had drawn the same horse with the same passion for so many years, memorising each stroke, that they could recreate that beautiful horse even with their eyes closed, I knew I was talking about the writing profession, and my own life. If a writer is to tell his own story – tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people – if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and patiently give himself over to this art – this craft – he must first have been given some hope. The angel of inspiration (who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on others) favours the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer feels mostly lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his dreams, and the value of his writing – when he thinks his story is only his story – it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal to him stories, images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to build. If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination – that another power has found them and generously presented them to me."

By the time, I read the last line about the startling gift the angel sometimes brings when you sit in your room long enough, I was almost gasping. Yes, oh yes. Sometimes that really does happen, even for ordinary waitress-writers like me.

37 comments:

What wonderful writing. Thank you for sharing this - which led me to read the entire translation, which was fascinating. I kept hoping he would share a quote from his father's writing, though his own is quite beautiful (of course!).

Especially for ordinary waitress-writers, and ordinary housewives (look at Harry Potter!) and ordinary everyone...because in the end, each of us is extraordinary - the only one of us who will ever be. I did not know this writer - thank you for sharing him (and, btw, this goes for any art as well as for writing)

Oh yes, yes, and yes. It's the best and worst thing about writing, the leap of faith one has to make to begin, the swimming through the current of it during the act of writing, and the gifts that arrive sometimes along the way — those moments when the current carries the writer...

To anon. who left what looks like a 20 page diatribe on various topics unrelated to this post or blog: I don't know if this is spam, or you're really a reader, but if you have that much to say, you need to start your own blog.

I'm so grateful you shared this, Patry! It's lovely. I'm swamped right now with life - kids, Christmas, sickness - all the usual, and my writing has dropped off to nearly nothing. Your post has brought the muse whispering back to my ear with words of hope and inspiration. Thank you!

Quite a beautiful quote. I think it is interesting, in an anthropological way, to wonder about which writers sense that their muse is external and which sense that it is internal. Would seeing a beautiful sunset and then finding the words to describe it be considered inspiration from another power? Would finding the words in one's own imagination be like sensing your own oneness with that power? Writing like yoga and prayer.

About Me

My second novel, THE ORPHANS OF RACE POINT, an epic love story that spans several decades and is tested by murder, betrayal, faith, and destiny, set amidst the vibrant Portuguese community in Provincetown, Massachusetts will be published by Harper on January 7, 2014.